January 30, 2000

By DAVID L. ULIN

THE BALM OF GILEAD TREE
New and Selected Stories. By Robert Morgan.
344 pp. Frankfort, Ky.:
Gnomon Press. Paper, $17.95.

here's a certain inevitability to Robert Morgan's fiction, as if the people and situations he portrays are not so much written as hewn from blocks of Blue Ridge Mountain stone. Partly, that's a function of landscape, which even more than language seems to motivate Morgan's writing; nearly all his work is set in the Blue Ridge region of western North Carolina, where he was born and raised. At the same time, Morgan brings to his efforts a timeless sensibility, a perspective bound up less with fleeting fashions than the belief that there may be something universal about the human condition after all.

Morgan's third book of short fiction, ''The Balm of Gilead Tree'' -- he is also the author of three novels and 10 volumes of poetry -- represents, in many ways, a showcase for his vision. Gathering seven stories from his previous collections, along with 10 new pieces, the book seems almost like a psychic history of the Blue Ridge Mountains, going back more than 400 years. From ''The Tracks of Chief de Soto,'' an account of the 16th-century Spanish explorer's exploitation of an American Indian village, to the title story, in which, after witnessing a plane crash, a highway construction worker loots money from the victims' bodies, Morgan's writing is remarkably consistent, focused on the fine line between desire and need. ''There's something about the things a man really wants to do that scares him,'' notes the 19th-century mason who narrates ''Poinsett's Bridge.'' ''He's got to go on nerve a lot of the time. And nobody else is looking or cares when you make your choices. That's the way it has to be.''

What's remarkable about ''The Balm of Gilead Tree'' is not just the sweep and scope of Morgan's stories but his ability to write about individuals in a wide variety of circumstances. Six of the book's 17 stories are told in female voices, a device that enables him to record the often disparate worlds of women and men with an insider's eye. Equally significant is the immediacy of Morgan's period narratives, which are concerned less with history than with the complexities of character, evoking the past in a way that feels contemporary yet still authentic. The 16-year-old protagonist of ''Kuykendall's Gold'' may be a frontier bride with little experience beyond her elderly husband's trading post, but the issues of lust and fidelity with which she wrestles are as relevant as anything a teenager might face today. That's true as well of ''Little Willie,'' in which a white country woman discovers a family of escaped slaves hiding in her henhouse and is forced to choose between her conscience and the law. ''We was already criminals for feeding the runaways,'' she explains. ''But looking at them wore-out people hunkered down you couldn't have done nothing else.'' Morgan brings history into three dimensions, seeing the past as a product of its daily life.

All this would be effective enough, but Morgan raises the stakes by bringing an equally acute set of perceptions to his accounts of modern times. The last half of the collection unfolds in the 50-plus years since the onset of World War II, and here the author establishes a subtle confluence, a commonality among his characters. Thus, for all her late-20th-century independence, Sallie Evans, the newly separated narrator of ''A Taxpayer and a Citizen,'' ends up confronting the same issues as many of her predecessors in the collection -- love and abandonment and how to keep one's children safe from harm. Similarly, Jones, whose incarceration in a German P.O.W. camp anchors ''Tailgunner,'' can't help existing in the shadow of Powell, the Confederate soldier who spends much of ''A Brightness New and Welcoming'' as a prisoner of Union troops. In both cases, perseverance is its own reward. As Jones remarks, ''When you think it's bad . . . just remember it can get a lot worse.''

Ultimately, it is the idea of history as fluid and interior that distinguishes ''The Balm of Gilead Tree.'' Even the most overtly historical stories -- The Tracks of Chief de Soto,'' say, or ''Murals,'' with its re-creation of the moment the Depression gave way to war -- address their subjects through a personal filter, recording ageless dramas of the way we live. Such a notion is only enhanced by Morgan's portrait of the steady shift of centuries. The farms and mountain shacks of the Blue Ridge may have yielded to highways and housing tracts, but the essential human struggle of its people stays the same.

David L. Ulin is editing an anthology of Southern California literature.